CSC grad Ron Rawalt tells Mexican murder story at conference

While Rawalt gave credit to others for solving the crime, he acknowledged that it was his unauthorized phone call that woke the U.S. ambassador to Mexico on a Sunday morning and soon caught the attention of Attorney General Edwin Meese, Secretary of State George Shultz and President Ronald Reagan that reopened the case.

Then stationed in Washington, D.C., Rawalt placed the call after reading in the newspaper that the Mexican government had earlier declared the Camarena murder was solved and the case was closed. He felt the decision had been rushed, believed a cover-up had occurred and was certain more investigation was needed. He was seeking soils that he could study to determine if soils found on Camarena’s body matched those of the purported burial site.

When he placed the call, Rawalt intended to talk to an FBI agent that he knew in Mexico City, but when he was told the agent was gone, Rawalt kept asking for someone who could help him. It turned out that the only person available was the sleepy ambassador.

While several of Rawalt’s superiors in the FBI did not appreciate his boldness, he was sent to Mexico “five or six times” to work on the case. Once he flew to Mexico in a jet that had been confiscated from one of the drug cartel leaders down a canyon beneath Mexican radar detection.

Rawalt noted that Camarena was a native of the San Diego and had been an agent for the DEA in Mexico for three years after being sent there to disrupt the powerful drug cartels operated by Ernesto Fonseca and Rafael Caro Quintero.

Rawalt said the pair had a billion dollar business growing marijuana and shipping it to the United States. They paid the Mexican government $100 million a year for the Department of Federal Security badges they wore and operated their businesses any way they wanted, including the possibility of murdering anyone who got in their way.

With the help of a colonel in the Mexican Air Force, Alfredo Zavala Aveler, Camarena located the marijuana fields in central Mexico and set fire to them and the barns that were used to dry the crop. Rawalt said “the bonfire” cost Fonseca and Quintero an estimated $640 million.

“It p----- them off,” Rawalt said.

Caro Quintero was only 33 years old, uneducated and had been a drug kingpin just six years, but already owned 300 homes in Mexico and was worth in excess of $650 million. Ernesto Fonseca was a 20-year veteran of the drug business and was worth about $3.5 billion. Besides his marijuana trade, he was paid millions by South American drug lords to provide protection as they moved cocaine and heroin into the United States.

Just after the fire, five Americans, two of them college students and three of them Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, were killed by those connected with drug trafficking without any repercussions being taken by the U.S. government. All five had been mistaken as by the murderers as DEA agents, so the drug cartel henchmen didn’t anticipate that they would be in reprisals if they also killed Camarena and Zavala.

After a supreme commandant was paid a million dollar bribe with the amount of cash so massive it had to be delivered in wheelbarrows, Mexican authorities reported that Camarena and his cohort had been killed during a raid at the Bravo family ranch some 120 kilometers from Guadalajara. But when Rawalt learned of the differences in the soils taken from the bodies and the Bravo ranch where the bodies were eventually found, he rang the alarm. He said the prevalent soils originated from different volcanic eruptions thousands of year ago and had few similarities.

Before going to Mexico, Rawalt, who cut his eyeteeth in soils by helping with the excavation of the Hudson-Meng Bison Kill Site northwest of Crawford as a CSC student, did some research. He went to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., to study maps and scientific papers. He also was referred to a mineralogy expert who helped him pinpoint where the type of soil found on Camarena’s body was generally present. It appeared to come from Primavera State Park located just outside of Guadalajara.

Rawalt also eventually got help from Loic LeRibault, the head petrologist for a French oil company who Rawalt said could pinpoint where almost any soil in the world came from by studying it under a microscope.

In addition, cadaver dogs from the Tuscaloosa, Ala., police department were obtained and used to help find where Camarena’s and Zavala’s bodies were initially buried.

During the lengthy investigation, Rawalt eventually found the car Camarena had been taken in following his abduction in Guadalajara, the steel bar that was used to kill him after he had been tortured for several days and even the license plate that had been on the car, although it had been bent in quarters and placed in a hole. The car was parked in a living room of a home belonging to a law officer who was supposed to dispose of it, but decided to hide it and eventually drive it. Blood found in the car matched that of Camarena’s.

Rawalt said the hardest part of the investigation was getting rid of the members of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police who supposedly were helping. He said they did everything possible to disrupt the investigation, including tipping off members of the drug cartels before Rawalt and his cohorts arrived. Often, Rawalt said, they would lose the MFJP officers while they were taking a siesta following lunch.

Before locating the spot where Camarena had been buried, Rawalt had guns pointed at him several times and once he was forced to return to the United States. He said last winter when he asked to return to Mexico to work on another case, he was advised not to by authorities because his name is still familiar to those who tried to work against his investigation 20 years ago.

The indictments eventually included several Mexican federal law enforcement officers and the brother-in-law of the nation’s vice president.

Over the years, Rawalt said he has testified at six trials that produced nine convictions in the case. He said he is always the final witness in the trials as he uses his soils expertise to pinpoint the spot in Primavera State Park where the bodies were initially buried and tells of the other evidence that was uncovered.

Numerous others who have been convicted, including the two primary drug dealers whose marijuana crops Camarena had burned, are still in jails in Mexico or other countries, he reported. A year or so ago, it was discovered that one of the drug lords had dug a mile long tunnel under his cell in an attempt to escape.

The Camarena family was just three days away from moving back to San Diego when he was abducted and murdered. His government pension has taken care of Mrs. Camarena and their two children. Rawalt said the U.S. government has given Mrs. Zavala a pension equivalent to what a widow of an Air Force colonel would receive and has paid for the education of their two children.

The conference continued Tuesday and Wednesday. The speaker Wednesday will be Skip Palenik, a forensic microscopist who has been involved in numerous exotic cases and was the recipient of the 2003 Distinguished Scientist Award given by the Midwestern Academy of Forensic Scientists.

About 200 law enforcement agents and criminal justice students from several colleges and universities are attending the conference.